Not to be a pita, but I think it is vastly clearer and safer to explicitly write SQLs explicitly into a variable, rather than read them from STDIN. In addition, I'm not a huge fan of using ->fetchrow_array() to get back a single method: that is exactly what ->selectrow_array() is meant for, I think. Finally, if the questioner is just starting to use DBI he should probably enable it's error-handling apparatus explicitly until he knows when/why he might not want to use it. Similarly, I would explicitly turn off autocommit to limit accidental damage to the DB.

No major changes there, smitz, but just seems "safer" this way to me....

my $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:my_db', 'user', 'pass', {RaiseError 
+=> 1, PrintError => 1, AutoCommit => 0}) or die "Error connecting to 
+DB: $DBI::errstr\n";

my $sql = "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM music";
my @row = $dbh->selectrow_array($sql);
print "Found $row[0] results\n";
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